want to read a true story while waiting to use the land line or plumbing-

Gretel Ehrlich was born on a horse ranch near Santa Barbara, California and was educated at Bennington College and UCLA film school. She worked in film for ten years, then began writing fulltime in 1978 after the death of a loved one.

1991 was the year Ehrlich was hit by lightning while taking a walk on her ranch. She was hospitalized and severly debilitated for several years. She writes of the experience in her nationally bestselling memoir, A MATCH TO THE HEART, published by Pantheon in 1994.

or fiction:

A solitary New Jersey librarian whose favorite book is a guide to suicide methods is struck by lightning in Alice Hoffman's superb novel, The Ice Queen. Orphaned at the age of eight after angrily wishing she would never see her mother again, our heroine found herself frozen emotionally: "I was the child who stomped her feet and made a single wish and in so doing ended the whole world‹my world, at any rate." Her brother Ned solved the pain of their mother's death by becoming a meteorologist: applying reason and logic to bad weather. Eventually, he invites our heroine to move down to Florida, where he teaches at a university. Here, while trying to swat a fly, she is struck by lightning (the resulting neurological damage includes an inability to see the color red). Orlon County turns out to receive two thirds of all the lightning strikes in Florida each year, and our heroine soon becomes drawn into the mysteries of lightning: the withering of trees and landscape near a strike, the medical traumas and odd new abilities of victims, the myths of renewal. Although a recluse, she becomes fascinated by a legendary local farmer nicknamed Lazarus Jones, said to have beaten death after a lightning strike: to have seen the other side and come back. The burning match to her cool reserve--her personal unguided tour through Hades--Lazarus will prove to be the talisman that restores her to girlhood innocence and possibility.